Getting the line spacing just right

I did a makeover of a slide that included a quotation from the man who discovered the circulatory system. I was SO pleased to get a public domain image of a portrait of him — considering the quote was from 1628!

But when I wrote his name and other information below the portrait, the line spacing was all wrong.

There was too much space between the lines. This is common when you copy and paste text from another source.

It’s common to need to made slight adjustments in line spacing and you can fix this in a couple of ways.

Use Shift + Enter

You need to be a nerd to know about this one. Shift+Enter is different from Enter when you’re creating a new line. Enter creates a new paragraph but Shift+Enter creates a new line without a new paragraph. If there are settings that automatically add spacing between paragraphs, this can help.

You can put your cursor before the 2nd line and press Backspace to remove the Enter character. Then press and hold Shift while you press Enter. Here’s the result, which is much better.

Change the line spacing

Another option is to set the line spacing to something that isn’t an integer, like .9 or .8. Follow these steps:

1. Select all of the lines of text that you want to adjust in the text box or shape.
2. On the Home tab, in the Paragraph group. click Line Spacing, then Line Spacing Options to open the dialog box you see here.
3. In the Line Spacing drop-down, choose Multiple.
4. Set to a number like 0.6 or 0.8 to move the lines slightly closer together.
5. Click OK.

Set the exact line spacing

The final option is to start out as in the previous list of steps but for Step 3, choose Exactly. Then specify a number in points. Unfortunately, PowerPoint doesn’t preview the results, so you’ll have to try a number and click OK to see what works.

Here’s the result. Better, right?

What do you do when you have too much (or too little space) between lines? Leave a comment and please share this post with others using the Share buttons below!